School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemSending a message: The Australian's reporting of media policy(SAGE, 2015-11-01)As Australia's only national general newspaper, with an elite ‘political class’ audience, The Australian has been at the forefront of newspaper proprietors' attempts to influence media policy. This article analyses The Australian's reporting of two key media policy proposals affecting newspapers: the establishment of the Australian Press Council in 1975–76 and the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation (the Finkelstein inquiry) in 2012–13. While the events were 36 years apart, the paper's stance and rhetoric were remarkably similar. However, its approach to journalism and to providing information to its audience changed in several important respects.
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ItemNews Corporation Tabloids and Press Photography During the 2013 Australian Federal Election(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2017)Academic attention has often been focused upon analysing words in journalism texts and, consequently, the impact of photographs in newspaper journalism has tended to be overlooked. This is problematic because images are a key method by which news is selected, framed and communicated, particularly in tabloid newspapers. This article focuses upon criticisms that tabloids from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation Australia were biased—against the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government and towards Tony Abbott’s conservative Liberal–National Coalition—during the 2013 federal election in Australia. Through an analysis of front pages, this article explores how photographs contributed to reporting the campaign and expressing the strong political preferences of News Corporation. The article concludes that Murdoch’s Australian tabloids shifted towards a British-style overt partisanship in their reporting of the 2013 election. Images were at the forefront of that shift as they are a powerful tool for conveying messages of newspaper support and opposition, and occupy a central place in how political issues, events and individuals are represented and understood.
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ItemPress Photography and Visual Censorship in the Australian Parliament(WILEY, 2018-03)Still photography is an important medium for visually communicating — and scrutinising — the power of elected representatives. However, it has been severely restricted by parliaments. Surprisingly, the photographs taken by press photographers have been viewed as a larger threat to parliamentary dignity than other seemingly more powerful media, such as television. This article analyses parliaments’ “extraordinary sensitivity to photography”1 by conducting a comparative, historical examination of press photography in five national parliaments — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The article discusses historical milestones in media access for each of these parliaments, but focuses particularly upon the unusual case of the Australian Parliament and its rules on still photography. The author draws upon interviews conducted with Australian press photographers, as well as an analysis of primary material — including parliamentary guidelines on media access, photographs, newspaper reports, parliamentary debates, inquiry reports and submissions.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSky News Australia(Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014)
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ItemWhat is a Journalist?: The view from employers as revealed by their job vacancy advertisements(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2018)
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ItemTHE DECLINE OF TRADITIONAL NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS AUDIENCES IN AUSTRALIA(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2009-05)With attention focused on the battle for news ratings between Channels Seven and Nine, an underlying trend has tended to go unnoticed: audiences have been switching off televised news and current affairs programs since the 1990s. Drawing on detailed OzTAM ratings, this article shows how this is particularly true for specific audience segments. Allied with this is the longer-term decline in newspaper circulation. These data raise a central question: are Australians merely switching off ‘outdated’ media such as TV and newspapers (and getting their news from somewhere else such as the internet), or are they switching off the genre of news/current affairs altogether? This article weighs the evidence and concludes that the news audience is fragmenting in particular ways, especially by age, and that some (but certainly not all) groups are going online for news.
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ItemUncounted Votes: Informal Voting in the House of Representatives as a Marker of Political Exclusion in Australia(WILEY, 2009-03)This article examines the implications of high levels of informal (or invalid) voting in Australian national elections using a social exclusion framework. The rate of the informal vote is an indicator of social and political exclusion with particular groups of Australians experiencing inordinate electoral disadvantage. Poorer voters, voters from non‐English speaking backgrounds and those with low education levels are especially disadvantaged by factors peculiar to the Australian voting experience. We begin by exploring the character and pattern of informal voting and then canvass the technical and socio‐economic factors which explain it. We conclude by considering proposed options for reducing informality, some of which are: the abandonment of compulsory voting, major structural change to the voting system as well as ballot re‐design, electoral education and community information initiatives.